Advances in technology have enabled relatively small computing devices to be associated with ever-increasing functionality. For example, many portable telephones are equipped with an operating system that allows various tasks to be performed using such portable telephones. These tasks include but are not limited to word processing, web browsing, mobile banking, amongst other tasks. Furthermore, many mobile devices that are not conventionally associated with an ability to communicate wirelessly are now equipped with wireless functionality. For example, portable multimedia players are currently equipped with antennas that allow signals to be transmitted wirelessly to and from the portable multimedia device. In another example, digital cameras are often equipped with antennas to allow the digital camera to communicate with a host device such as a personal computer.
Additionally, many currently available wireless devices are equipped with hardware and/or software that enables the device to determine its current location. For example, a portable telephone may include a global positioning system transceiver that can be utilized to determine a current location of the portable telephone. Thus, for instance, if a user of the portable telephone dials an emergency number, the current location of the portable telephone can be transmitted to the receiver of the call. Accordingly, an emergency response unit can quickly ascertain the geographic location of the user of the portable telephone. In another example, a portable device may transmit GPS coordinates to a server that, upon receipt of the GPS coordinates, can transmit map information to the portable device such that the portable device can cause a map to be displayed to the user that illustrates a current location of the user.
Currently, however, there is no suitable mechanism that can verify that a location of a mobile device transmitted to another application has not been tampered with by the owner of the mobile device (or other malicious person) or software running on the mobile device, such as drivers, an operating system, or other applications. For instance, GPS traces can be stored in memory of a mobile computing device and a user of such device may access the memory and modify coordinates in the GPS traces. An application that receives the GPS trace would have no indication that coordinates provided by the mobile computing device were subject to tampering.